Making Food: A Marin cheesemaker plays with tradition

In this new Inside Scoop series, Making Food, we explore the Bay Area’s expanding universe of food entrepreneurs—and the delicious, creative foods they’re making. We begin by profiling local finalists in the 2015 Good Food Awards.

What makes it special: A true farmstead cheese, Atika is made on the farm the same day the animals are milked. Buttery and nutty when young, the cheese becomes increasingly crumbly and grassy with age. The coral-beige basket-weave rind—flecked with different colors of naturally occurring bacteria—is washed with McEvoy Ranch olive oil during the 3-10 month aging process. The cheese tastes strongly of the animals’ milk, and pairs well with fresh or dried fruits.

The people: Tomales Farmstead Creamery is part of Toluma Farms, a sheep and goat dairy in the Marin County town of Tomales. The owners, husband-and-wife David Jablons and Tamara Hicks, bought the farm in 2003 and started the creamery in 2012.

Where to buy: Find Atika and the other Tomales Farmstead Creamery cheeses at the Pt. Reyes and San Rafael Civic Center farmers markets. Visit Tomales Farmstead Creamery’s website for a complete list of where to buy.

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AM: Why did you start Toluma Farms?

Hicks: Spending time up here [in Marin], we learned a great deal about all the pioneers that had done amazing things to protect this land. We made a conscious decision that that’s where we wanted to put our extra money, toward a piece of property.

Do you work full-time on the farm?

Because the whole thing is still not completely financially sustainable, my husband and I have non-farm jobs in San Francisco. I’m a clinical psychologist. I still see patients in my private practice two days a week in the city. David is a physician at UCSF. He runs the lung cancer program.

How did two medical professionals get into cheese-making?

For eight years, we sold the [goat’s] milk to Redwood Hills in Sebastopol. We knew that unless we had our own value-added product, it was just never going to become financially sustainable. So we got a USDA value-added product grant to start getting the creamery off the ground and making our own cheese.

How did you learn to make cheese?

The College of Marin has a cheese certificate course, and I took that course. Then my husband and I went to Vermont and did a cheese making course. At the end of all of that, we still didn’t know how to make cheese, so we ended up hiring somebody who worked in France for seven years as a cheese maker on a goat dairy.

Are mixed milk cheeses, like Atika, becoming more popular?

You wouldn’t do that in France. It’s just unthinkable. Here, you can be playful and do something no one has really done before. There are friends of ours down the street, and one has buffalo and is making buffalo milk gelato, and he has extra milk, so our other friend at Bleating Heart Cheese is going to make a quadruple milk cheese: a sheep, cow, goat and buffalo milk cheese.

How would things be different if you were somewhere other than the Bay Area?

Somebody who’s making cheese in Idaho is spending a similar amount to make the cheese, but they can’t get the price point to make it financially sustainable. In the Bay Area, people understand what they’re paying for.

So is it easier for farmers to make it here?

Even though people go to the Ferry farmers market, and prices are high, most farmers are breaking even, if at all.

Did you know that going into this?

We didn’t know what a stress it would be financially or on a relationship.

As a psychologist, I have patients who are doing biotech startups or other types of startup, and there’s a lot of overlap. Our cheese business is still a startup, and it’s the same as starting any business where you’re not profitable for a while and you have to find all the right people or it’s not going to work.